You can implement a JSON parser in a single line of code in C, but why?

To win an entry at IOCCC.

This argument seems to be about the real meaning of words versus their overloaded legal analogues. I can’t imagine Venezuela’s military kidnapping Trump, then saying they would run the United States now, being parsed like this.

That's not my point at all. I'm only saying that your criticism and claims of fraud are probably directed at the wrong entity.

To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?

Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.

To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.

It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.

The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.

We can't help ourselves, we can't help others, but did you see that politician's wife in her expensive boots?

Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.

Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.

Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.

Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.

You're joking, but they're really trying hard to make cool things uncool.

I think it's not directly in their interest to make anything uncool. They're there to suck away some of it for themselves, that's all.

I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.

I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.

I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.

People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.

>I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.

There you go.

"Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.

God no! Useful and valuable is incredibly cool! How could you write this?

Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").

There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.

Yes, Google is no longer producing good results for them. That is what I'm addressing.

It seems you didn't read the article, which doesn't tell anything about google being cool or uncool.

The title is "Google is dead".

To be fair, I find the title to be misleading.

That is fair. It's dead to me though.

That message still makes me laugth. That's a three cell comic strip with a silence in the middle.

The steel men (armored enemy knights) are exactly the inverse of the straw man (training dummy) metaphor. I think it's a fantastic term since it directly addresses the point (tackle the best opposing arguments head on instead of a poor subset/facsimile of them), it fits within the existing straw man metaphor, it's terse, and it's very clear.

Thanks for replying.

I work in a big company where everyone knows how to "accept criticism". What they don't know is how to fix the problems. The company here had a tweetfest, then a blogfest, then an apology fest. Did they even consider sitting down with a glass and looking at the product?

I guess I understand what is meant, but what is the actual attack? It’s more than a little abstracted from any consequences, like kids using google to search for boobs by typing ‘boobs’.

So you “put it on the internet”.

I realize how crazy this looks at first glance, but have you considered paying people to work on your side projects for you? I have tried it and it is rewarding.

Most people I know who take on side projects do them because they enjoy solving problems. They find them enjoyable, and to many, side projects are like taking a vacation. I wouldn't pay someone to take a vacation for me, that's nonsensical and defeats the purpose of the vacation.

Why would you pay someone to do something you enjoy doing, so you don't have to do (any/some/all) of it? What kind of side projects are we talking about here?

In my case I wanted a particular piece of software that I had visualized. I found someone and agreed on a price, and provided what we needed to collaborate, and watched the progress. He accepted critical feedback and did a good job. That software has been adapted and ported to more platforms since. The effect was to compress my time and energy invested, and I paid with money earned from my full time job.

I’m still glad I did it. It’s okay to farm out the intensive work and savor the fun bits yourself. There are people waiting to do this for cash.

There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself.